The New York Times Questions The Journal's Integrity

The Atlantic | The Players: The New York Times vs. The Wall Street Journal

The First Serve: Yesterday, David Carr of The New York Times wrote a column questioning the future of Rupert Murdoch and News Corps. "The News Corporation may be hoping that it can get back to business now that some of the responsible parties have been held to account — and that people will see the incident as an aberrant byproduct of the world of British tabloids," he wrote. "But that seems like a stretch. The damage is likely to continue to mount, perhaps because the underlying pathology is hardly restricted to those who have taken the fall."

Carr also pointed to Murdoch's strategy of burying problems: "And the money the company reportedly paid out to hacking victims is chicken feed compared with what it has spent trying to paper over the tactics of News America in a series of lawsuits filed by smaller competitors in the United States."

Fellow columnist Roger Cohen, who had previously defended Murdoch, furthered the conversation in a column that appeared on The Times's site yesterday (and appears in the International Herald Tribune, a Times company, today) which questions Murdoch's character. "Murdoch is a flawed genius whose very ruthlessness has now led him to his comeuppance," he wrote. "He knew, more viscerally than anyone, what postmodern societies wanted to satisfy their twisted appetites and he provided that material in all its gaudiness. I don’t think he created those appetites. But he sure fed them"

Meanwhile, Monday The Wall Street Journal published an editorial defending its owner and its integrity (and was met with a chorus of social media jeers--covered here). The board did not stop there and took the opportunity to lob barbs at The New York Times and The Guardian.

"We also trust that readers can see through the commercial and ideological motives of our competitor-critics. The Schadenfreude is so thick you can't cut it with a chainsaw. Especially redolent are lectures about journalistic standards from publications that give Julian Assange and WikiLeaks their moral imprimatur. They want their readers to believe, based on no evidence, that the tabloid excesses of one publication somehow tarnish thousands of other News Corp. journalists across the world."

The Return Volley: Schadenfreude? Chainsaws? Joe Nocera of the The Times responded to the WSJ's allegation of schadenfreude. "Well, yes, the schadenfreude is pretty darn thick," he writes in today's column. "Who would deny it? The whole thing reminds me a little of the ending of Ian McEwan’s wonderful novel “Solar,” in which the many awful things the central character has done in his long life suddenly come together to bury him in an avalanche of comeuppance. I’m O.K. with that."